kitchen dragon @draco@kith.kitchen

I made vegetarian ravioli from scratch on Saturday. Froze half of the batch, ate that today. Homemade pasta is a decadent amount of work, but it was worth it.

So yesterday I found out that my stainless steel frying pan doesn't get enough appreciation.

That raised the question: What kind of pans do you - fellow kitchen dwellers - use for what?

I tend to just grab a non-stick pan as default. I will admit that cast-iron pans scare me a little; I'd be afraid of making mistakes with cleaning.

Adventures in making paneer: I realized that I need more acid and heat than my paneer recipe asks for, and I wondered whether the milk I use might be more processed than milk available in other parts of the world. (I always use the cheap standard milk from the supermarket, it's homogenized, pasteurized and "extended shelf life".)

The microwave paneer I tried today required some patience until I could get the milk to curdle, and on top we had a power outage when I was in the middle of it.

#MealPlanGenerator

The idea:
* We have three lists of favorite dishes: winter, summer, and soups. (There's some overlap between winter and summer dishes; the distinction is there to account very roughly for seasonally [un]available ingredients.)
* The generator randomly picks a dish for each day. Wednesday is our soup day.
* it then prints the dishes into a LaTeX file with nice formatting, so we can print the list and stick it onto our kitchen door.

Today: Tinkering with #LaTeX and #python so I can generate a meal plan for the next two weeks.

The wife and I had this idea last autumn, first as a way to plan our shopping better (and not have to run to the store every day), and then we appreciated that this brings more variety to our dinner table.

I'm nearly there, all that's missing is the actual writing-to-LaTeX part. #ProgrammingForBetterEating #MealPlanGenerator

Idk, for me, including people's dietary requirements as far as I'm aware of them and as far as it's within my abilities should go without saying.

Another funny food thing: A fellow singer from my choir has celiac disease. So last time we had a get-together with cake and all, I made a gluten-free cake.

People: "Wait, you have to eat gluten-free too?"
Me: "No, I just want to make sure B. can eat this cake, too!"

And now I'm suddenly craving smoked tofu and I have none in the house.

Don't know if this rant was preaching to the choir here. Ask me anything about plant-based cooking!

I like tofu, if it's prepared as tofu, not meat replacement.

What I don't like is the way people just toss it in a dish where they would throw in meat otherwise. Some dishes don't even need that, e.g. if you already have a rich creamy sauce. In other cases, tofu needs a different preparation.

Doing tofu justice is, IMHO, an art unto itself.

Also, if you *want* meat alternatives, tofu is not the only one.

So I was at a family celebration last weekend and there were, like, 3 vegetarian people in a crowd of ~20. It always surprises me when I find myself in a small minority food-wise, and also how many meat-eating people just have no earthly clue about vegetarian cooking. Maybe that's because I do it every day and I don't see how it's hard.

We had run out of white flour, so I made Udon from whole-grain wheat flour. The dough was a beast to work with, but less sticky than white flour dough (thus easier noodle-cutting) and the taste was special, but I liked it.

Hrm. Do I prepare some Udon dough now? Or is that a little over the top? I have only done it once so far, and it IS a lot of work, but so worth it, and I suppose I'll get better at it with practice.

TFW you want to make some staples, but ALL THE dishes and cutting boards are dirty because the wife threw a pizza party for her students. (A wager she does every year is that every class who, on average, does more than a marathon per person at her school's annual charity walkathon gets one session where they watch a movie and she bakes them pizza instead of regular lesson. Her pizza game is quite amazing.)

Oh well, leftovers it will be tonight.

Funny how every one of my main sources for #vegan recipes has their own take on Pad Thai. I want to try all of them and then I'll probably develop my own from that.

My favorite, up to now, is the one from the Vegan Black Metal Chef, in part because of the presentation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeZlih4DDNg

I prepped some overnight oats mix!

½c rolled oats
1 tablespoon chia seeds (I'm trying out flaxseed because I ran out of chia)
½ tablespoon sugar
½ teaspoon cinnamon

per portion. I used old honey and jam jars, they are perfect for preparing 1 serving.

To prepare for the next morning, I add ¾ cup of soymilk (or other milk; I never tried this with cow milk) and let it sit in the fridge overnight. I usually eat it with some banana, sliced apple, nuts or berries.

I made raw buckwheat porridge for the first time. Definitely a make-me-again and a nice change from my usual overnight oats!

https://ohsheglows.com/2011/07/11/raw-buckwheat-breakfast-porridge/

#breakfast #vegan

#introduction

Hello kitchen! I have been eating #vegetarian for about 20 years now, and I find myself sliding towards #vegan cooking every so often. I love vegetables and whole-grain bread. I live in Germany.

Cuisines I like, apart from the hodge-podge German-US collection of dishes I picked up over the years: Indian, Italian and recently I've developed a curiosity about Japanese kitchen.